Word: militiamen
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...government school's single row of tiny classrooms. The boys crib last-minute homework from each other. Then the men with guns arrive-six of them in a pickup truck, two more on a motorbike, all toting M-16 assault rifles. It is the job of these government militiamen to protect two cars and five motorbikes carrying a dozen teachers. Their convoy speeds into this sleepy village with the well-rehearsed urgency of a presidential motorcade...
...According to a senior Hamas official, that deal fell at the first hurdle: Israel refused to release only a handful of the prisoners on the Hamas list. Negotiations simmered until June, when Hamas seized control of Gaza from rival Fatah militiamen, and talks were broken off. Now, Israel is debating the possibility of freeing around 400 prisoners, including some on Hamas' top 100 list who are deemed unlikely to terrorize Israel again...
...arrive. One has a cast on his left forearm, the bone shattered by a bullet; another is on crutches, his right leg amputated after a knee-capping; a third lost his left eye. Abdi's room feels like a field hospital. But it was to escape such horrors - militiamen had killed their mother and another brother on their farm outside Baidoa - that Abdi and his brother left in 2004. "We chose South Africa for a better life," he says. "We came here for peace. But we got a war worse than Somalia...
...deal with Israel. For now, he says, it has only led to fighting among Palestinians. "The Koran says that if you kill your brother, you go straight to hell--and this is what we're doing," he says, outraged by recent news reports from Gaza of Hamas and Fatah militiamen killing each other in a power struggle. He thinks Palestinians should "try to fix our own problems before we take on the Israelis." Those problems are real enough. Because of international sanctions against the Hamas government, salaries aren't paid, and most Palestinians are broke. As it has been since...
...rest of Iraq, the hope in Qaim is that the American burden will lessen as Iraqi security forces take the lead. In Baghdad and other centers of sectarian violence, where the security forces are riddled with militiamen and where Shi'ites patrol hostile Sunni neighborhoods, that hope is more like a fantasy. But in al Qaim, foreign jihadists not too long ago antagonized local Sunni tribal leaders; and now the Americans have used that local history to win cooperation from the same maligned tribes, recruiting personnel for the Iraqi army and police. "It's in our best interest to train...